Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Monday, February 07, 2011

My Grunt Jobs

Furniture-mover in Santa Barbara; exterminator in West Los Angeles; grave-digger in Culver City; factory worker in Venice, California; letter carrier and mail handler in Los Angeles; logger in Forks, Washington; tree-planter in Oregon; taxi-driver in Boston; plus assorted day jobs out of Manpower Temporary Services in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Boston. One thing's for sure: blogging beats logging any day of the week, though the pay is not as good.

Five reasons to avoid blue-collar work: (1) The working stiff gets no respect; (2) the pay is often bad; (3) the work is boring; (4) working-class types are often crude, ignorant, resentful, envious, and inimical to anyone who tries to improve himself; (5) the worker puts his body on the line, day in and day out, and often bears the marks: missing thumbs, hearing loss, etc.

Being from the working class, and having done my fair share of grunt work, I have been permanently inoculated against that fantasy of Marxist intellectuals, who tend not to be from the working class, the fantasy according to which workers, the poor, the 'downtrodden,' have some special virtue lacking in the rest of us. That is buncombe pure and simple. There is nothing to be expected from any class as a class: it is individuals and individuals alone who are the loci of value and the hope of humanity.

But individuation is a task, not a given. Nicht gegeben sondern aufgegeben.

There are no true individuals without self-individuation, something impossible to the mass man who identifies himself in terms of class, race, sex, and who is never anything more than a specimen of a species, a token of type, and no true individual.

And then these types have the chutzpah to demand to be treated as individuals. To which I say: if you want me to treat you as an individual, don't identify yourself with a group or a class or a sex or a race.